David Yates wanted the final Harry-Voldemort confrontation to feel inevitable, mythic, decided by fate rather than skill. He watched Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and saw how Leone built the tension: extreme close-ups of eyes, the score building across unbearable silence, death arriving as punctuation. Yates borrowed Leone's grammar for the duel. In a 2011 Los Angeles Times interview, he was explicit about this influence. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly streams on Criterion Channel.